2007-10-11

How it started

Picture it ... Ottawa ... 2005.
My fiancée (currently promoted to wife) and I had a big blue Ford Taurus sedan whose exhaust system was going to cost $900 in repairs. The boat of a car had a book value of $500. We should have been wearing ear protection while driving in that thing - I'm sure some greasy bar-hopping men with well lubricated hair would have been very impressed.

As luck would have it, we were researching our next car that would be fuel friendly, stylish, and practical for a small family (we were planning to keep it for several years). Some resources that we used was the EPA of the US&A and trusty google.

Things we discovered:
  1. Gasoline-Battery hybrids are damn expensive
  2. Sub-compact cars have very little storage room
  3. Diesel internal combustion engines will burn a whole family of non-fossil fuels
Number 3 intrigued us. It had excellent fuel consumption (1000km per 55L tank on the highway, 800km in the city). We knew of the Topia GreenStop selling biodiesel so we could use that as our main fill-up stop. Then we saw we could make our own BioDiesel. And if we were crazy enough we could convert our car to safely run on waste vegetable oil.

We had no developed plans for this kind of madness. But we'd get a sexy black VW Jetta 4-door automatic that has good fuel consumption. So we got this:


No comments: